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Thursday, January 20, 2011

An abortion doctor who catered to minorities, immigrants and poor women was charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday.

(snip)

Gosnell "induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," Williams said.

This sort of thin used to be legal. It was called an intact D&X (dilation and extraction). The trick was, to make sure the scissors, or whatever, killed the baby before it was born, when only the head had come out. That way it was technically an abortion.

The day I found out about this sort of thing (I can still remember it clearly), I felt my world had darkened by two shades.

Of course, there really is very little difference between killing a baby this way before or after it is born, or at a much earlier stage via dismemberment, or even earlier through a blender contraption that sucks it out and chops it up.

I'm sure the liberals want to make it ONLY about the criminal acts, because it's far too uncomfortable to consider all of the aspects of the case.

Certainly, many criminal acts involved. That's the first issue, and that's where the liberals want to stop the conversation. Move on. Nothing else to see. We'll do a court trial and shut this all down and hope it all goes away.

"Let's get this straight", they say. "There is nothing else to discuss."

Touched a nerve? You seem to enjoy extrapolating all kinds of nonsense about religion yourself, happy to make baseless declarations about what you think I believe. I was just putting this in similar terms.

To help you out with the above story, which is more than simply a criminal matter are the wider ramifications. Here's just a couple off the top of my head that came to my mind when I read through the story.

1. How systemic is the failure of the State in monitoring the abortion clinic. The health violations, patient treatment, storage of body parts, hygiene etc etc should all have been spotted and acted on a long time ago. This lapse cannot be swept under the carpet.

2. Many of the women were lied to about the age of the fetus. How common is this practice in other abortion clinics?

3. The "evidence" being left around of severed feet, seemingly a collectible for the monster (which no matter how hard the most ardent pro-life people try to call it a blob of protoplasm, they still look like little feet) seems to indicate the possibility that abortion clinics skating on the wrong side of the law simply get away with it because they destroy the evidence.

4. There is a political movement to extend the permissible abortion period (right up to birth) so an insight into this clinic gives us good reasons to debate this movement.

5. Some women clearly knew they were obtaining an illegal late term abortion. This brings up all sorts of issues such as if any should be prosecuted; an assessment of the number of other back street operations in existence; the health dangers they face going through this procedure, the potential lack of alternatives and support for women in the position of wanting a late term abortion, and what desperate measures they may take when they feel they don't have any options.

6. The staff involved would have clearly seen illegal and unsafe practices and apparently never did anything, or if they did make complaints, they were not followed through, pointing to further issues. (I'll read the report later, as I think it covers this issue)

A number of Family Planning organisations have been caught out not reporting cases of statutory rapes, of performing illegal abortions, of accepting donations for racist purposes and of unsafe practices, and little seems to have been done about it.

The papers have come up with a classic "evil" one to take away the focus from the clinics with freshly painted walls and sterilised forceps. It may do the reverse though, and this is what the pro-aborts are worried about, this is why they want this to be a quick court case restricted to a couple of illegal actions around care of the women involved. They are worried that if investigators scratch the paint off the pristine abortion clinics that we may find that such callous indifference to life is part and parcel of the abortion industry.